today on the meme curmudgeon

[pauraque_bk]

I was about to post this on Twitter, but, uh...

Social media has lowered the bar for doing good

This has been going on a lot longer than Twitter and Facebook have existed. Remember when colorbars were sincere and not ironic? Thems were the days. I actually have always felt the same way about awareness ribbons (even though I used to wear one, it was for breast cancer... guess I was a hypocrite!) and bumper stickers and so on. It makes perfect sense that this stuff has migrated to social networking, which for many people is largely about looking good in front of their friends.

I don't think it's as consciously cynical as that makes it sound. I doubt anybody is thinking "Ha ha, by turning my icon green I'll make my political views apparent to my friends, thus earning their approval!" But it can come off that way, and it doesn't surprise me at all that most people stop at the symbolic part and don't do anything concrete.

I wish we had more of the "donate $10 to Haiti with a text" memes and less of the merely symbolic ones, is all I mean by this.

Comments

[skywaterblue.livejournal.com]

I think what bugs me is how much it drops out of the public eye after the disaster. You can see it happening to Haiti right now, and of course, a lot of people on Twitter have given up caring about Iran. I try and retweet things to give them a signal boost, but then I do think I fall into the category of people who care about such things year round. (Which may be a false self-assessment.)

[pauraque]

That too. There's a long list of things you could name like that, where Twitter and LJ were full of sympathy and support for a few days or weeks, and then it's on to the next thing. I think it's not even just boredom or poor attention span, but that it becomes uncomfortable for people to be reminded that major problems continue to be major after the "post your support" meme has run out of steam. There are aspects of it that can be dismissed as naive, but after a while, when you see it over and over again with every new (or "new") catastrophe, it begins to look self-righteous and wilfully ignorant.

Probably none of us can claim we've never fallen prey to it. But it's no good.